The award of its own degrees for the first time last Saturday marked a very important chapter in the history of the University of Ghana at Legon and also of education generally in Ghana. The importance lay first in the consolidation of the autonomous status of the University; but even more so in the opportunity afforded by the convocation for re-examining the purposes and directions of higher education within the new national setting.

We were cheered by the realisation of the need, long argued by us, to alter the habits and customs of the University to be more reflective of the society in which it exists and from which it derives the means of its existence. Simplifying the life of the under-graduate will no doubt have its beneficent result in attenuating his modes and habits to the circumstances of life of his own indigenous society. It is a good start in the descent from the ivory tower. But it is by no means sufficient to place the University in the milieu of thought desirable for our national purpose. The crux of the matter lies, in our view, in academic attitudes, in the content of the knowledge acquired and imparted, in the shape of thought prevalent there which have the possibility of associating with the thinking of those who pass through its gates.

We recognise the atmospheres within which Universities in a great many parts of the world have developed, and the natural urge to apply or seek the same patterns. Knowledge, it is argued, is best acquired without bounds, in an atmosphere of complete freedom. This is the usual dogmatic approach, according to which knowledge is abstract and expressed in a vacuum. We cannot agree. For knowledge, like all of man’s faculties, must be directed towards a given purpose, otherwise it wallows in the mud of idealism and dies without being of service to mankind. Our contention is that while academic freedom is desirable, it cannot and indeed ought not be a substitute for national purpose. At best, it is a necessary complement of the national purpose, insofar as some freedom is required for the acquisition of the knowledge needed in pursuing the aims of our given society. Under no circumstances, however, can academic freedom be justified in compromising the purposes of the nation.

Our Contention

We will contend again that a nation committed to a planned economy must of necessity exercise optimum direction on the ends of her education. For since the products of education provide the man- power without which the best plans cannot be executed, and since effective execution depends invariably upon the faith of the executionists in the aims and purposes of the plan, it stands to reason that education must be so directed as to avoid a collision of faiths. When a University in a one Party socialist democracy has as the head of its Department of Political Science a man who believes that such a society as we have created or seek to create is a myth and that neither socialism nor one-Party system is compatible with democracy, then the university is seriously compromising the national purpose whatever else it might mean.

For the men who pass through this department are the men who are going to shape the government of the one-Party democracy, and if they are imbued with disbelief in and contempt for this society then how can they possibly be expected to work for it with any measure of consistency. This is the dilemma which those who over-see the importance of academic freedom ignore. And this is the service which one can give to neo- colonialism, even if only by default.

 

We are happy that the University recognises the special role it has, along with other institutions of higher learning, to play towards the success of the Seven-Year Development Plan. Our hopes are that side by side with this recognition we shall see a re-orientation of the University, to recognise and accept the purposes of the revolution of the people of Ghana which the Plan is drawn to serve, to search for and disseminate the sort of knowledge